


Burning Phon

by Laylah



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Crimes, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-16
Updated: 2010-10-16
Packaged: 2017-10-12 17:41:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/127364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/pseuds/Laylah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Console jacking is risky work even when the console in question <i>does</i> play nice with the greater net, and more so when it's a detached system like Phon's. Balthier can see the calculations happening behind Fran's top-of-the-line copper optics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning Phon

She has silver-white dreads so long she could sit on them, if she ever stopped moving long enough. Balthier -- he calls himself Balthier, heard once it's a word that means "pirate" in a dead language, figures it's as good a handle as any -- has never seen her do it. Mostly he sees her at the pit fights in the low city, sees her dance across the floor in a blur of brown skin and white hair and black Kevlar. There are ID tags knotted into her locks, and he'd roll his eyes except that he's heard the rumors about her hunting skill, seen the way she fights. He'd bet each one of them has a unique number, and he'd bet he can find most of the numbers in the ISA's missing persons database. At the rate she's going, in another few years she'll have a kill count like

*

Ba'gamnan has never trusted fixers. They're cagey with their information, and greedy with their fees, and some of them -- Dalan, in the Sand Colony, comes to mind -- seem to be playing both sides on the same job. But a lot of the best clients, the ones with the credit to be worth his time, don't like to deal with the wrecking crews directly, so for now he's listening to this one, Jules, a skinny little rat-faced man who seems to know enough about a dozen different autonomous networks to put prices on his head in every major remaining currency.

"The Judge is looking for someone to provide a little extra security for the mainframe at Phon," Jules says. His eyes are unfocused; he's streaming more intel as he talks. "It's detached for a reason, lots of classified shit in there, but one of their guys went rogue and they think before they caught up with him he passed off some of the specs for their project."

Ba'gamnan hums. "Passed them off to who?"

Jules shakes his head. He even grins like a rat, twitchy and sharp. "Someone they haven't been able to find. Hotshot cowboy, good at covering his tracks. Calls himself

*

"Balthier," the boy says, not getting out of her way. He's skinny, white, and he smells like he's all flesh. Fran's nose twitches.

"You have thirty seconds," she says, "before I take your tag."

Adrenaline panic washes off him, but he smiles. "It'd take you longer than that just to find it."

He hasn't a chance against her like this. In the net might be different, but here she could rip him open without breaking a sweat, and nobody in the low city would even ask her why. "Tell me what you want," Fran says, "before I get bored enough to start looking."

Balthier licks his lips. "There's a job I want to hire you for," he says. "I need someone with the physical-world skill to get into a locked-down complex and patch me into a secure intranet so I can raid the

*

Console jacking is risky work even when the console in question _does_ play nice with the greater net, and more so when it's a detached system like Phon's. Balthier can see the calculations happening behind Fran's top-of-the-line copper optics. Beyond their noise-canceling screen, the whores and dealers and cowboys of the Whitecap do business in a flutter of constantly-moving iridescence and liquid black.

"I want fifty percent," she says, crystalline nails clicking against the table, like it's a nervous tic. "And a fee up front."

"That's a bit steep, isn't it?" Balthier says. If she insists on it, he'll deduct it from her half, he figures, and then make himself scarce. He's good at disappearing.

She shrugs. "You want the best, do you not?"

Balthier nods. "I do. What's the fee?"

"Here." Fran turns her head, pushes her hair back over her shoulder so he can see the processor mounted flush against her skull, just below the spot where her ear would be if it weren't for the surgery she's had to re-shape it. "I want a diagnostic, and I want you to streamline the code."

That's a much more _interesting_ charge than a one and a long string of zeroes, at least. "You don't know me, and you trust me to be able to improve a Loxley combat processor?"

Fran smiles. "If you cannot," she says, "then I will know I should not bother working with you."

"Fair enough," Balthier says. His heartbeat kicks up, a primitive adrenal reflex he can't bear to have overwritten. "Let's find someplace where I can get into that lovely hardware in comfort." Somewhere far from here; they'll want to head out of

*

The low town is always crawling with rumors. Information is one of the most valuable currencies left in the Neo-Imperial Archipelago, and anything valuable enough is worth counterfeiting. Ba'gamnan doesn't let on he's looking for anything, just moves through the converted warehouses and dive jockey bars and all-night noodle shops, listening to what people already want to say to each other. The Marquis is hacking the Archipelago's systems, or else providing a data haven for their new weapons development, depending on where you listen. Someone tipped off the cops about a big serpentwyne cooking operation out west gate, and the raid ended in a fire that took out most of the drugs and maybe some of the cooks. One of the usagi razorgirls left the Nalbina Pit the other night with some barely-modded cowboy she could eat for breakfast. The shooter who took out Phon's runaway hacker had double serpents etched into the back of his gun hand.

Ba'gamnan gets himself a bottle of cold sake and sits in the holo bank of the Cloudborne, letting the pieces slot together. Given the choice, he hunts like a crocodile, finding a good place and waiting for the prey to come to him. He might not have the speed to track down a bunny and a hyped-up cowboy, but if they're on his turf there's just about nothing he can't

*

"Take the key out, please," Balthier says. He's already plugged into his deck, through the heavy-duty jack at the nape of his neck, his high-collared shirt tossed aside. A lot of guys would use this as a chance to make a pass at her, but he doesn't seem to be thinking of anything but the job.

Fran reaches up, pries out the key that blocks access to her processor, tilts her head to bare the socket.

"You want me to set it?"

"Go ahead," she tells him. "You are the expert."

He laughs a little, and smells nervous again, but his hands are steady when he plugs her in, and the connection's every bit as smooth as the last time her virus doctor checked her out. He sits back, one hand drifting to the touchpad of the deck. "Ready?"

"Do it," Fran says.

Balthier closes his eyes, strokes the deck, and slides into her nervous system so smoothly her vision barely shimmers.

He rides her nerves so lightly, so cleanly, she almost can't feel him there. She could get up and walk around, she thinks, as far as the cord would let her. She turns to watch him, the shallow rise and fall of his chest and his eyelids fluttering with cowboy REM. His lips move, just slightly, but she's fairly certain that she hears his voice only in her brain:

 _This is a beautiful system_ , he says. _It doesn't give you any problems?_

"Never," Fran says. "You think it is already optimized?"

 _Didn't say that_ , Balthier answers. He sounds more confident, more assured, in this state. His mouth curves up faintly in a smile. _There's never been a system, organic or mechanical, that couldn't be improved. Here, try_

*

This is already the best job he's ever been on, and it's just getting started. Fran's combat processor was some of the most beautiful wetware Balthier's ever had the privilege of exploring, and even though she must have noticed how much he enjoyed it -- he knows quite well how sharp her senses are -- she hasn't said anything about it.

And now they're _doing_ it, burning Phon: he has her optics patched into one window, and the schematic for the Phon compound active in another so he can track her progress. _Left_ , he tells her. _Left again. Down to the end of that hallway. Yes._ She stops at the final door. _That one_.

Even from here it's incredible to watch her, the way the processor rewrites the pulses that fire her muscles, the way she can use her augmented skeletal system to leverage that much strength -- the handle on the door yields when she pulls, creaking and bending enough for her to slip inside as the alarm starts to sound. Balthier turns down her ears' sensitivity just a fraction, to keep that from becoming a liability.

 _Now_ , he says, _I need you to -- blind hardwired mother of scions_.

Fran laughs. "Impressive?" She doesn't wait for his instruction, just steps up to the front control for the mainframe and opens the maintenance panel.

 _It's quite a piece of work_ , Balthier says. _There. That's the connector you need._

"Right," Fran says. Her hands are quick and steady, stripping back the wire and patching in their transmitter. Milliseconds blur past in the corner of Balthier's field of vision -- and then the signal goes live, hits his deck hard enough to swamp him in raw data.

 _Dialing back bandwidth to you_ , he says, shifting his resources into the transfer between Phon and his own machine. _I'll need about --_

And Fran tenses, all systems alert, turning to face the door, where Phon's security has arrived. Even through the low-resolution stream, the threat's ugly enough: the bruiser in the doorway is even more heavily modded, less human, than Fran is, and his lips curl back from a row of even, pointed teeth.

"Not good," Fran breathes.

 _Keep him off the transmitter_ , Balthier says. _All I need is thirty seconds and we're done._

Fran nods. "I can

*

give you that," the razorgirl says.

"I haven't asked for anything yet," Ba'gamnan says. The razorgirl curls her lip, and kicks. Ba'gamnan steps into it, catches the kick on his shoulder -- the usagi are just as flexible in the flesh as in pleasure sims, and that's saying something -- and strikes out himself. He has time enough to think, why doesn't she flee? And then he has to give control up to the lizard brain and its programming, because the usagi is just too fucking fast. His body moves without him once he toggles over, driven just by the need to best the prey. He sees in heat-tones her bright core and the satellites of her limbs, and the air _reeks_ of circuitry and sweat. She can almost dodge well enough, almost keep him at bay -- he can't land a good _solid_ blow, but she can't avoid him completely, either, and when she lands off-balance for half a second he lunges, and this time she falls -- he lands half on top of her and she kicks hard, harder than she should be able to, knocking him back and curling her legs under her like she's getting ready to

*

 _Run_ , says Balthier's voice, crackling and staticky in the back of Fran's head, as the building's lights flicker and die, and the overhead fire control system starts to stream gas into the room. She scrambles up and bolts for the door.

"We get it?" she asks. Something grinds together jarringly in her left ankle every time she puts her weight on it.

 _We got something_ , Balthier says. _Something big with the codename Strahl_.

She can hear the bruiser's footsteps behind her as she runs. How well can he see in the dark? "Is the way clear?"

 _Should be. Phon's building systems have an autoimmune problem right now. I have it attacking its own code. All locks should be open for at least the next ninety seconds._

Fran boosts herself up into a gaping elevator shaft, climbing the emergency ladder two rungs at a time. As dark as it is in here, her optics aren't doing her any good, and she relies on her sense of smell, the shifting air currents over the folds over her ears, to tell her where to turn at the next floor. "What now?" she asks under her breath.

 _Left_ , Balthier says. He sounds clearer now. There are emergency lights glowing dim phosphor yellow overhead. _You're above ground. You should be able to break a window in -- yes, that way._

The door she's chosen looks like an office complex, little drab workstations with no dividing walls, but the glass in the window breaks when she throws one of the chairs through it, and then she's out, well ahead of the bruiser and free on the slick black streets at the edge of the Archipelago.

She knows better than to stop, running for the city center with long, easy strides. Balthier is a humming presence in the back of her skull. "Where do we go from here?" she asks. Around a corner and there are people, down another block and there's a shopping district, where she can duck into a crowd and look for a way back to him.

 _I think it's time we both made ourselves scarce for a while. I'll want some leisure to examine our haul, and I don't expect you'll want to be around when the Judge decides to get involved personally. Any vacation spots you're especially interested in seeing?_

Fran snorts soft laughter, and shoppers edge away from her. "Are you propositioning me?"

 _Could be_ , Balthier says. _Are you going to go after my tag?_

"We'll see," she murmurs. "You'll just have to be skilled enough to keep me entertained."

She hadn't known it was possible to laugh in the net.


End file.
